


1-4 Together Breakfast

by iippo



Series: Steven Universe Renaissance [4]
Category: Steven Universe (Cartoon)
Genre: Gen, alternative universe
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-03
Updated: 2020-07-03
Packaged: 2021-03-04 21:26:58
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,589
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25053115
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/iippo/pseuds/iippo
Summary: Having breakfast together with Amethyst in the Crystal Temple sounds like the perfect morning to Steven, but he ends up biting more than he can chew.
Series: Steven Universe Renaissance [4]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1796686
Comments: 2
Kudos: 12





	1-4 Together Breakfast

**Author's Note:**

> An alternative universe. See series page for more details.

A beautiful pink and yellow dawn was breaking over Beach City. Steven Universe was up early. He opened the window with a view of the sea, took a deep breath and listened to the sounds of the waves lapping and the seagulls squawking. He felt great.

“Amethyst’s gone out,” Steven observed. “So I guess I’m makin’ us breakfast!” He went to the kitchen.

Steven raided his kitchen cabinets for everything vaguely breakfast-y, making a mess. This breakfast needed to be perfect, no regular old cereal would do. He found a packet of waffles and stuck them in the toaster, two at a time. Then he stacked the warm waffles on a plate, and drizzled syrup all over them. It looked amazing.

Steven stepped over to the temple door and knocked. “Amethyst? Are you in there?” After receiving no answer, he turned around and decided that it was quite okay that Amethyst hadn’t arrived yet, since he could think of an improvement upon the breakfast.

He microwaved a bag of popcorn and once they were all popped, he dumped the lot over the waffle-syrup stack, creating a waffle-syrup-popcorn mound. An instantly superior breakfast, ready for   
Amethyst to arrive.

Steven sat by the warp pad and tried to count in to Amethyst’s warping home. But no matter how many times he tried it, the warp pad didn’t activate. Amethyst didn’t come. He rolled on his side in disappointment.

“I guess she’s still out saving the world,” he mumbled to himself and looked at the breakfast stack. He went over to the kitchen and tried to think if there was anything else he could add to it. He found a can of whipped cream and squirted a liberal heaping on top.

“Look at you, you are out of control!” Steven announced to the breakfast. He really needed Amethyst to see this. He went outside and called for Amethyst, but there was no response. He came back inside and spotted a punnet of strawberries on the side table. That’s it, the last element that will crown this breakfast, he thought and went to work.

Steven took the most perfect strawberry and placed it with killer precision on top of the whipped cream. It was finally, definitely, _done_ _._

“It’s, DONE!” Steven exclaimed and gazed upon his masterpiece. Then he sighed and flopped across the counter. “That thing's too good for me to eat alone. It’s a... Together Breakfast.”

Right then the door bust open and a purple police officer forced his way in, yelling “Dumb Police! Uhhh, you’re dumb!” He shot the Together Breakfast with a water gun.

Steven didn’t have time to analyse the situation, he acted solely on instinct, and his instinct was to protect his glorious creation. He jumped in front of the wet projectile shouting “noooo!” as the water soaked his shirt. The breakfast was safe. For now.

The purple cop was of course Amethyst, using her shapeshifting abilities. She changed her head back to normal and laughed as her long white hair fell down her back. “Oh man, I totally got you! You should’ve seen the look on your face!” 

“Awh, I knew it was you,” Steven said crossly, got off the floor and walked over to his closet. He took off his wet t-shirt and pulled out another exactly identical t-shirt. He had tons of the same pink shirt with a yellow star on it. It was his favourite shirt.

“Pfft, how?” Amethyst asked, rolling her eyes.

“Because that’s a water gun. And I’m not dumb.” He replied.

“You got something on your shirt,” Amethyst pointed out. Steven looked down at his shirt, and as he did so, Amethyst sprayed him again, laughing her head off. She threw the water gun to the side and Steven was left to get the water out of his eyes as she shapeshifted back to normal and headed to the temple door.

Amethyst went inside the temple and the door closed behind her. “No, wait a minute!” Steven called and ran after her and grasped at the door. “Where’s the handle, how do you open this?”

He studied the surface of the door. It was made of smooth stone and on the upper part there was a star-shaped carving with four gems on it. He recognised his own and Amethyst’s gems on the door, but the other two were unfamiliar. He pressed the gem he matched as his own, then Amethyst’s, then the others. Nothing happened. They were clearly not buttons, doorknobs, nor doorbells.

“I’ve seen Amethyst go in and out a thousand times, why have I never asked how she does it?” He mused out loud. He really couldn’t think of it being anything special, Amethyst just walked towards the door and it opened. He tried that a couple times but the door did not react.

He looked at the glorious Together Breakfast and felt desperate because it really needed to be eaten together.

Under his shirt, Steven’s gem began to glow and the rose quartz gem-shape on the temple door began to glow in response. He turned to look just in time to see a rose-shaped aperture appear in the middle of the door and open with a burst of light, accompanied with a graceful sound. Steven didn’t stop to ponder how it had happened and ran inside with the food. Now all he needed to do was find Amethyst!

Steven entered the temple. The door closed behind him, and then disappeared completely. He found himself standing on a soft pink field surrounded by clouds. Steven was confused; he had been inside Amethyst’s room before, but his current surroundings didn’t even seem to be inside a building. Had he missed the entrance to the temple somehow? He started walking forwards, looking around but there really wasn’t anything to see. “I need to find a way to wherever Amethyst is,” he mused out loud. Almost immediately he came across a ladder, that led upwards into the pink clouds.

He looked around but since literally every other option he had was “keep walking aimlessly in the pink clouds,” Steven took to the ladder and began to climb. Soon he realised that the difference between wandering around pink clouds and climbing a ladder through pink clouds wasn’t really that huge and started to wonder what else he could do. The memory of the door disappearing started to bother him. Maybe this was all a really bad idea. Maybe there was a good reason he didn’t normally go inside the temple. But he persevered in climbing onwards. “I have to find Amethyst. I can’t let this become a Together Brunch!” He justified himself.

Eventually the ladder came to an end, resting against a square hole in a sheer, grey rock face. Steven climbed up and was glad to be standing on solid ground again. He looked around. He was in a huge, dark cavern with floating stepping stones. There were several square openings at different levels of the rock face. Steven entered the tunnel he was standing at after checking that the Together Breakfast was still keeping it together. The tunnel was pink and had veins of quartz running in the walls. It was an incredibly long tunnel and walking along it got boring fast.

His mind drifted and he wasn’t paying attention to where he was going, when suddenly the Together Breakfast started to levitate off the plate he was holding. Steven glanced around and realised he was walking upside down on the ceiling, but the Together Breakfast was slowly falling towards the ground. He quickly caught the food back onto the plate and flipped the plate so that he was holding it upside down from his persective but the right way round when seen from the ground. He picked up his pace a little, finding the magical tunnel a little bit uncomfortable.

After a moment of walking the breakfast began to float again and he reoriented the plate to be the right way up again. It was like the floor of the tunnel did a loop-de-loop. He was glad to be the right way round again and out of the tunnel.

Steven exited the tunnel and felt a sense of triump upon the familiar sight: Amethyst’s room! The high cavern was full of stuff, and junk, and things. Now it was just a matter of finding Amethyst.

After a moment Steven came upon her.

“Oh, hey Steven,” Amethyst greeted her, mildly surprised. “How’d you get in here, did you come down the waterfall? There’s always junk falling down here,” she explained.

“Junk like what?” Steven asked.

“Junk like… you!” Amethyst yelled and suddenly picked Steven up, hoisted him above her head. Steven laughed. “I’mma throw you in the junk pile!” Amethyst yelled and did so, throwing him on top of a pile of stuff. “Seriously though, how’d you get in here?”

“The door activated, and then I climbed up the ladder from a field of pink clouds,” Steven explained.

Amethyst was puzzled about the ladder and was about to say something when Steven mentioned the field of pink clouds. “Wait, that’s Rose’s room! Dude you gotta be careful, that place is really dangerous, you shouldn’t go in there.”

Before Steven had a chance to reply, Amethyst spotted the plate Steven was holding. “Oh what’s that, Steven?”

“It’s a together breakfast,” Steven explained. “It’s not exactly healthy, but it’s in a stack, so I guess you could say, it’s a _balanced breakfast?_ ” He grinned at his own pun, straining against laughing at his own joke because Amethyst didn’t react. “You know, like I made us breakfast. I thought we could eat together. Like, like best buds!”

Amethyst smiled and nodded. “Yeah, that would be great.” They sat down and Amethyst rummaged through her piles and found some forks for them to use.

The Breakfast was fluffy and sticky and airy and sweet, and the popcorn just brought all the flavour profiles Togehter in a perfect way. And what’s more important, they chatted and laughed and overall spent quality time together while eating, exactly as Steven had planned.

After it was all finished, Amethyst leaned back and closed her eyes in contentment. Steven smiled and picked up the dishes. Handily, Amethyst’s room had several puddles of water to use for washing them. He crouched down and plunged the dirty plate into the water – only it wasn’t a normal puddle.

Steven had unwittingly chosen a puddle that was only a thin sheen of water over a hole, which led to a different room in the temple. And since the puddle had no depth or resistance as he was expecting, he went in much too hard and fell right into the puddle and through the hole. He managed to yelp in surprise, alerting Amethyst, who saw his red sandals disappear from sight.

Amethyst gasped. The hole led directly to one of the most dangerous parts of the temple. She ran after him.

Steven flailed as he fell to a dark, hot room filled with different color bubbles, all of them with a gem inside. His flailing flung one of the forks across the room, and the fork hit a bubble and popped it. Steven hit the floor with a thud right as the newly-freed square-faceted red gem began to glow. A white light emerged and began to take shape. The light-shape went through several different versions of a diminuitive humanoid form with a square head before it began to grow bigger and bigger, sprouted horns and a tail and solidified into a big red monster.

“Steven!” Amethyst yelled. Steven and the monster turned to look towards the source of the voice, and reacted at the same time. Steven ran towards Amethyst while the monster ran away from Amethyst and disappeared into a tunnel.

Amethyst and Steven hugged. “What’s going on?” They asked each other at the same time.

“Well I fell in here through a puddle and accidentally popped one of the bubbles,” Steven explained.

“And the gem monster that was inside the bubble was able to form,” Amethyst conjectured.

Steven looked up at the hundreds of bubbles floating in the air above him. Did all of these bubbles hold a monster? He realised that that was what Amethyst had done after the Centipeetle fight, and indeed all fights against gem monsters: she created a bubble and whisked it away by magic. He had never thought about what that was about or where the bubbles went. But now it was clear. They all came here, to this room in the temple. His mind filled with questions, comments and concerns, but Amethyst interrupted his thoughts.

“We have to find it and put it back in the bubble. Which way did it go?”

“I... I think it was that way,” Steven said pointing past the pool of lava, and they headed to the tunnel leading away from the room. The spiraling tunnel sloped upwards and the tension of the situation – the possibility that they could find the monster behind the curving wall at any moment – made it feel like they walked for forever. Finally they came to a round room, with a large pool and waterfalls everywhere.

“Wow, cool!” Steven sighed. It felt like there was lovely calming music in the air everywhere. Amethyst looked around and down where the waterfalls fell out of sight into darkness. “Hey, I think we’re above my room. I think all the junk that falls down the waterfalls comes from here,” she mused. It was odd though, because there really was no junk to be seen here. Nothing but the soft surface of water.

The path followed the edge of the room and they could see another opening on the opposite side of the circle. Seeing no sign of the monster in the waterfall room, they continued to the tunnel. It was quite short and they came out through an opening to a huge cavern with floating stepping stones. Steven recognised the place.

“I came to your room through here,” he explained to Amethyst. He looked around a moment and spotted an opening below them. “There, that one leads to your room!” Amethyst picked Steven up and hopped nimbly from stone to stone to get to the lower level.

“Wait here,” she said, putting Steven down and ran into the tunnel to her room.

After a moment she returned. “Not there either,” she said relieved. She would have been really mad if a monster had gone into her room and wrecked her system – or worse, cleaned her room!

On the cavern wall opposite was another opening, with large red pipes going in. They hopped across the stones to it. Steven realised he had seen those pipes all over the temple. Entering the opening they both gasped, Steven because he was impressed, Amethyst because she was horrified. At the center of the room was a red, pulsating mass that all those big red pipes connected to from all directions and disappeared down the tunnels and through the walls.

“The Crystal Heart!” Amethyst exclaimed. “We have to be really really careful now,” she said to Steven who nodded and put his hands behind his back. They went around it carefully and down the tunnel.

They came to a fork in the tunnel. The wall between the two tunnels had a dent and something was on the floor. Steven picked it up; it was a broken horn, the monster’s horn. It seemed that the monster had ran into the wall, broken its horn, and ran down one of the tunnels. Steven glanced at Amethyst and she shrugged her shoulders.

“Should we split up?” Steven asked, looking down one tunnel and then the other but neither had any indication where they led or which the monster had chosen.

“Sure,” Amethyst said cheerily, thinking how much quicker it would be if Steven were to check the empty room while she found the monster in the other room. It didn’t occur to her that it could go the other way round.

Amethyst went down the left tunnel, and came to a red room where everything was formed from square slabs of red marble. She felt confident that the monster would be here; after all, the monster was also red. But the room was high and had several ledges and levels, and she would have to climb and check all of them. With a determined nod she got to work.

Meanwhile Steven had followed the tunnel on the right and ended up in a blue room. The walls and floor was made of lumpy grey stone with raw blue crystals standing out from it. The air was chilly and fresh and he could feel a draft. He wondered if there was a way out of the temple from this room and if the monster might have escaped. But he couldn’t see any other tunnels than the one he had come in. Steven was about to turn around and go join Amethyst when he heard something. A noise that sounded like a growl. Or a deep snort. Or a sigh. Or a whimper. Or it could have been a sneeze. It was actually quite difficult for Steven to interpret monster noises.

Steven looked towards the direction of the sound. There was a small alcove, shaped like a triangle, that was dark inside. He approached, careful to not make a sound, and peeked. The alcove had small shelves with various objects on it and paintings on the wall, one depicting a sunrise, another with a blue and red gem dancing, and some abstract ones with squares and triangles in various shades of purple.

Inside, flopped to the floor, was the monster. It was about the size of Steven’s dad, had a wild mane of hair and two horns of which one was broken. It’s legs were hairy and ended in hooves for feet, and it had a long thin hairless tail. One hand was a hoof and the other one had what seemed to be a huge stone gauntlet. It’s eyes were covered with a bandanna. It didn’t notice Steven as he approached.

As he was hovering at the opening of the alcove, wondering what to do, Amethyst appeared at the entrance of the room. She spotted Steven. “Hey, Steven!” She hollered. The monster looked up and faced Steven.

“Meep,” Steven managed to peep as the monster charged. Steven managed to step out of the way as the monster rammed out of the alcove. It realised it had missed, turned around to gain its bearings and spotted Steven huddled by the wall. It snorted and Steven could see small puffs of smoke come from its nostrils as it dug its hooves in to attack. It charged.

“Shield shield shield shield shield,” Steven chanted frantically, closed his eyes and crossed his arms in front of him, bracing for impact.

There was no impact. Amethyst had grabbed the monster with her whip and was holding it off Steven. The monster struggled forward for a while before it stopped and turned around to figure out what was holding it back. It spotted Amethyst and charged at her. She dropped the whip wrapped around the monster, letting the whip dissolve, and summoned another one. She lashed it across the face of the monster but her attack had no effect; she had to side step the charging monster and run a little distance away. She wrapped the whip around it again and jerked it to throw the monster against the wall, but the monster was surprisingly solid and didn’t budge. It snorted again and charged at Amethyst.

Steven watched the fight in distress. “This is all my fault. I came in the temple so that we could have Breakfast Togehter, but now it’s tearing us apart!” He looked frantically around but all that was there was what they had brought with them. Including the horn that had broken off.

The broken horn gave Steven an idea. “Amethyst!” He yelled. “The monster is hard – but brittle!”

“What does that mean!?” Amethyst yelled. She had the monster wrapped in her whip and she was pulling with all her might, but it just wouldn’t poof.

“Let it go and come here, I have a plan!” Steven yelled. Amethyst hesitated, but seeing Steven’s face look so sure, she relented and ran to him.

The abandoned whip dissolved and the monster turned to face them. “We’ll stand here in front of the wall as it charges, get ready to jump out of the way,” Steven explained in a hurry when the monster took aim and charged, horns at the ready.

“Okay, three, two, NOW!” He yelled and Amethyst and Steven both launched themselves in opposite directions when the monster crashed directly at full speed into the wall where they had stood just a split second before.

The monster broke into pieces upon impact, there was a poof of pink dust, and then there was nothing left except for a red round gem with a square facet. Amethyst picked it up and bubbled it, sending it away by magic. She turned to Steven.

“Good job, Steven!” Amethyst congratulated him. “Your plan poofed the monster, which you released from the bubble in the first place!”

Steven’s face fell at the reminder of his mistake. Amethyst hurried to make him think of something else.

“Err, all that fighting made me hungry again. Do you think we could make some more Together Breakfast together?” 

Steven’s face lit up. The Together Breakfast had been a success.


End file.
